Jeri wandered into intensive care wearing a hospital gown at ten o’clock the morning after—about the time I was starting to come out of it, though I was high as a kite on a very nice morphine derivative. She’d spent the night up on a different floor, under observation. She had a slight concussion after landing on her back on the floor, hitting her head on that door. My concussion was worse. We traded concussion stories like old combat Marines, and she held my hand for ten minutes with Dallas smiling at us—then a gang of nurses chased them both away in order to do terrible things to me, one of which was unmentionable and involved a catheter.
All of this was fine fodder for the media. A news van had pulled up at Sjorgen House before any police or ambulance crews got there, and, later the following day, I saw myself on television—again. It had taken considerable effort on the part of blackout artists to render Jeri, Kayla, and me acceptable for consumption by an alert, eager, news-hungry nation.
I missed Greg’s funeral. Catheters, I didn’t have to be told, make for awkward, unsightly travel. But my sister, Ellen, came by and we had a good long visit until I lapsed into morphine-derivative unconsciousness right in the middle of a sentence I don’t remember starting.
Awake the next day, I decided it would be a good long while before I showed up at the Golden Goose and heard what that sonofabitch O’Roarke had to say about all this. As it turned out, I didn’t have to. Five days into my recovery, when I was hours out of intensive care, he wandered into my room with a shit-eating grin on his Irish mug, a bunch of dumb-ass pink-and-white carnations he’d probably swiped from the room next door, and sixty free-drink coupons that wouldn’t expire until the end of the year.
In time, of course, the police trooped in, meaning Fairchild. He wasn’t happy that we’d solved his case for him, made him and the department look bad on national TV. Before the Sjorgen House Battle, his men had tracked down the bare-bones, sanitized agreement that had given Sjorgen House to Edna Woolley, but not the reason behind it. They’d never heard of Jacoba, Victoria, or Winter. They’d been spinning their wheels while the country’s finest gumshoe—okay, gumshoes—had busted the case wide open. Forty years had buried the relevant history too deep, even if it was the police department that had helped to bury it. I tried to cheer Russ up by pointing out that he had been about two years out of diapers at the time Edna took over occupational possession of Sjorgen House, probably tearing around his backyard on a bright yellow Big Wheels and watching Sesame Street or Mr. Ed reruns on television. That was the first and only time I’d been given the finger in a hospital.
* * *
I went home after eleven interminable days, six days after they removed the drains from my chest, four days after I decided hospital food might be more lethal than being run through with a sword. Dallas was with me when a nurse pushed me out the front door in a wheelchair, through half a dozen video cameras and a flurry of inane questions. She drove me back to my house in a brand-new Mercedes, one in which neither Jonnie nor his head had ever taken a ride. By then, Jeri was away on a case, somewhere in Las Vegas. It had been five days since I’d last seen Kayla.
Ever the note-leaver, she’d left one on a nightstand in the bedroom. It read:
Dear Mort,
She would have died for you.
I’ve gone back to Ithaca.
Please forgive me.
K.
What was to forgive? Things had gotten pretty hairy down there in that dungeon-basement. I could understand her not wanting to remember any part of it. I set the note down, feeling rotten even though I’d known she was gone, known back at Sjorgen House that terrible afternoon that she and I would never make it even if we survived the ordeal. Not after what had gone down.
“That from Kayla?” Dallas asked, looking at the expression on my face.
“Yeah. She’s gone.”
“I’m so sorry, Mort.”
“Uh-huh.”
I was still tired. Dallas hung around a while longer, made me eat a little soup, then she left.
* * *
In time, however, and it didn’t take all that long, considering, the entire business took on something of a dreamlike quality. I think that was because it was so weird, the whole thing. The horror of it softened to something resembling a well-remembered nightmare—frightening as hell, but unreal. I could deal with it. At times I could even shut it off, forget it for full minutes at a time. I could even watch Leno and laugh. Jonnie had died very badly, maybe worse than he’d deserved, Milliken too, but people die badly every day and too many of them are innocent children, so I didn’t shed a tear for Jonnie, per se, just for the sick horror of it all. Mostly, I tried to forget.
A week went by. I was in the shower and fairly well recovered from my wounds when the doorbell rang. Perfect timing. God must arrange these things to see what’ll happen. So, not wanting to disappoint, I got out—dripping—thinking now was my big chance to run some hotshot media buzzard from my doorstep all the way to the sidewalk by the seat of his chinos. The sutures had been removed. It would be a
